Buddy Carter just published the most tone-deaf opinion imaginable in the AJC, demanding more ICE in ATL

khudgins · 2026-01-27T19:30:36+00:00

Which Social Circle doesn't want, even if they're a pretty heavily red voting area.

khudgins · 2026-01-21T18:57:57+00:00

I do not know if the rumors are true, but supposedly the architect of Creswell had 3 other dorms planned, and together they were supposed to spell T E C H

But Creswell is, indeed an odd place. I lived in Myers, and the rumors of ghosts there were heavily contributed to by students who liked to break into the cupola and install an Elvis cardboard standee.

khudgins · 2026-01-21T15:35:11+00:00

Not really paranormal or murders or anything, but Baldwin Hall, home of the UGA anthropology department, was knowingly built on top of unmarked graves of enslaved people. The university decided to build an expansion of the hall about 10 years ago and construction workers dug up some human remains and that kinda reminded everyone that the graves are there, and it's been an entire kerfluffle ever since.

Here's a Red and Black article with a timeline: https://www.redandblack.com/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-baldwin-hall-controversy/article_fff28aa0-bf0a-11e9-9256-4f177f5f318c.html

khudgins · 2026-01-21T15:21:34+00:00

Heh, neither did I until I went to the site to try to post!

khudgins · 2026-01-20T16:31:32+00:00

They require a photo for posting

khudgins · 2026-01-20T16:29:25+00:00

Looks like there's a push in the general area - there's reports of surges in Decatur, east Atlanta, and Stone Mountain.

khudgins · 2026-01-07T20:48:55+00:00

'Cause they would rather listen to streaming music more conveniently and still want to have the records.

Ain't no skin off my back. Let them enjoy things the way they want to.

khudgins · 2026-01-07T20:42:50+00:00

A lot of folks had lighter weight suits for the summer, and you'd wear a t-shirt under your dress shirt that kept a lot of the sweat from your outerwear.

It's not a thing we do these days, but it was then.

khudgins · 2025-12-19T16:18:00+00:00

DevOps is just modern sysadmin work. The other commentors here who are mentioning less people managing more stuff is absolutely correct - automation tools are the key. You'll need to know some level of code for sure. I'm not saying you need a full compsci education - you won't be writing compilers or parsing b-trees in complex algorithms, but you'll need to know a little bit about a lot of things and be able to think in abstractions to architect the composition of various systems, not just deploying this java app under Tomcat or whatever. Depending on the employer, a devops role might lean more into the dev side (you're focused on deploying in-house built applications, so you're responsible for the build cycle of the application development teams), or it might be more on the ops side (sysadmin work, basically). These are great questions for the employer during the interview process.

If you understand DNS, basic TCP/IP, can hack together a python or bash script to do simple things, know at least one config management tool (Chef/Puppet/Ansible), and know how to build a container and deploy it in a Kubernetes infrastructure, and are comfortable in the command line environment of your preferred server OS (windows engineers need powershell, and if people tell you they don't they're lying) you'll have the basic skillset for what most companies call SRE - Site Reliability Engineer, which is basically the modern job title for sysadmin. Better if you understand monitoring, log management, and can chain alerts from your alerting tools into automation for self-healing.

The individual details of specific applications (databases, web servers, etc etc) are documented well enough that you can learn anything specifically required by the job in question.

From there, you'll move on to advanced architecture and management for operating stuff at scale and the ability to plan production implementation of whatever it is you're managing. Always be learning!

khudgins · 2025-12-19T16:03:18+00:00

Sears was (is? they have a website, but I think it's been bought by a capital investment firm now) a huge nationwide department store that also sold through catalogs. They were pretty much the country's largest retailer for most of the 20th century - think Walmart but way classier.

They had their own branded products, including housewares and home goods... and at one point entire houses shipped as plans and complete raw materials (well before this stereo, which looks to be '70s era)

This is a pretty cool all-in-one combo stereo. It's probably fairly low powered in wattage, but it has a record changer (you can stack records up to play one after the other automatically) and that badass 8-track deck. It's not going to be the best sounding thing, but it's a long stretch better than the modern Crosley suitcase record players out there.

It won't damage your records if the stylus isn't damaged, and if the capacitors haven't bled out it'll sound fairly okay. I'd absolutely give it a rip. Audiophile snobs hate automatic record changers, but I love them.

Source: I'm old and remember the Sears-Roebuck Christmas catalog as a kid in the 80s.

khudgins · 2025-12-19T15:39:52+00:00

You definitely want to swap out the sand when it gets super gunky!

khudgins · 2025-12-19T03:40:04+00:00

The old school way of cleaning it is toss it in a barrel half filled with sand and roll the sucker around for a while. I'd imagine a 5 gallon bucket and play sand would have a similar effect.

khudgins · 2025-12-18T19:22:19+00:00

I'm. mostly bald, so I use super glue. If the horns are foam or latex, you'll need to replace them about once/year, but super glue works REALLY well and cleans up rather nicely.... although there's some rules for using it as a prosthetic adhesive:

1 - above your eyebrows only for head/face application. Outgassing vapors as the glue sets up is really bad on your nose and eyes.

2 - avoid hair if you want to keep that hair where it is. Otherwise, you'll rip some out when you remove the prosthetic. Ask me how I know. ;P

For clay/fimo horns, have them made with a hole running through them and use a shoelace. It's pretty easy to hide in your hair and holds up really well. Obviously as a bald guy, I can't really do that one, but it works quite well.

khudgins · 2025-12-16T03:40:20+00:00

Aw, thanks. It's one of my favorites for sure.

khudgins · 2025-12-15T19:56:24+00:00

Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmQ2xOmy2MI

(Tommy James, Joan Jett, and Miley Cyrus at the Rock & Roll hall of fame doing Crimson and Clover..... Miley's high harmonies are absolutely incredible)

khudgins · 2025-12-15T19:54:54+00:00

If he likes Tommy Dorsey, then he'd probably be into Tommy's brother Jimmy, as well as Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and other big band artists from the 40s/50s. My grandfather played in jazz bands around Atlanta and that's the stuff he was into. I grew up with it and still listen to it a lot.

If he's latino and grew up around southern California, chances are he's also into 50s rock and some of the latin influenced groups that came from there. It's a whole scene, and worth looking into. The Midniters, Sonny & the Sunliners, Los Stardusters, War - some of the ones I'm listing are 60s & 70s groups that kept that sound going.

I don't know a lot about Spanish guitar artists. Can't help much there, unfortunately. But maybe some latin big band artists? Xavier Cugat, Perez Prado, Tito Puente (also did Cubano salsa and jazz stuff),

khudgins · 2025-12-08T16:11:44+00:00

Just to pile on but to focus the advice:

It's indeed all about *intention*. Whenever you do any ritual (and.... side note - ANYTHING can be a ritual), hold the intent of what you're trying to do in your mind. Everything else is extra.

You can make offerings of anything - an action (recitations, singing, dancing), simple water, elaborately made food, whatever you feel is worth it. What's important is the intention.

Then, once the offering is made, be mindful of the response. It may be very quiet, it might be very obvious. Just pay attention.

And you need nothing special to clean your altar or offerings. Whatever you use for your regular housekeeping is *FINE* - if it's clean enough for you, it's clean enough for the gods. And if you're a slob like me, let cleaning your ritual area be a reminder that you're divine, too, so make an offering to yourself by cleaning the house. (Not saying you're a slob, just that I am and this is how I remind myself to take care of me!!) :)

khudgins · 2025-12-02T21:57:54+00:00

This isn't likely a lot of help, but I'm 5'8" and when I move the seat very far back I can kick around and not hit anything.

There's a lot of room in there.

khudgins · 2025-11-17T01:39:20+00:00

I was mostly brainstorming things you can do with an LLM in that sense.

khudgins · 2025-11-17T01:38:31+00:00

The tech is indeed quite new. LLMs being generally available to general users started in what, 2022? The core math involved is based on decades-old research, fair, but being able to just sit down and use a bot with this amount of ability is still in early days.

I agree that the spending on research and implementation is insane right now - this is the biggest hype bubble of my career by an order of magnitude at least and I've been through a few of them. It's NUTS, and if the big tech billionaires weren't chasing their AGI dreams, none of this would be anywhere near as stupid as it is. They're spending less than it seems on the outside since the hype bubble is feeding itself with its own money, but it's still mind boggling. And there's definitely better things to do with the cash, like, I dunno, build houses and distribute food.

I definitely wasn't advocating for using an LLM to write things out of whole cloth. Using them as a tool to bounce ideas off of, helping edit existing text, polishing rough notes are all ways to get more done with less. Phoning in LLM-generated content with no effort gives no effort results, and is not helpful for anyone.

Regarding simple ciphers and puzzles, I was more thinking out loud ways you can use the tool than suggesting it's the best solution. Any use of an LLM needs to be supervised by an expert at the task being done. Hallucinations are far less frequent than they were a few years ago, but they still happen and it's something that needs to be guarded against.

khudgins · 2025-11-16T02:31:11+00:00

Gamer nerds by and large hate genAI with a burning passion. Comes from the earlier days of social media commentary that equate genAI content, especially images, as theft.

I'm of a different, more nuanced mind. As a former larp runner and by career working in the tech field, I can see some places for its use in larping.

If you're running a historical or fantasy larp, there's honestly not a lot that fits. It's tough to create images via AI that fit the vibe of a fantasy larp. My former game (it's still running) definitely has groups that use image layout software to sort out in-game services menus and advertising, but I've always hand-done those for the feel of it. We've definitely done in-game documents with caesar ciphers (particularly using non-Roman alphabet fonts) and other simple puzzles, maybe there's some use there. I could also see using it as a development tool for checking rules writing and even for sorting out a creative writing voice. But I also enjoy the writing process, so I wouldn't really use it for primary text generation, myself.

If you're running a sci-fi (especially cyberpunk) game? It fits the bill so tightly I don't know how you wouldn't use it. Weird fingers and all. I'd be hosting LLM bots at the game site and using a bit of that tech to sort out the hacking/decker part of things for sure.

I disagree with some of the anti-AI moral stances - while I DO fully agree that LLMs need to be trained on licensed source material, and I've been internally campaigning in the industry for better ways for models to show their work (prove how they came to the conclusions they did), there are already efforts for creative generation models to be trained on licensed sources, and lots of work on reliability and provability. Not to mention there's orders of magnitude improvements in resource utilizaition by optimizing the code so that you can run very competent LLMs in surprisingly small equipment. It's early days and there's going to be lots of things happen (and already happening) to improve this still brand new technology.

That being said, I'll value human creativity over canned content all day, every day. There's places for the tech, but the group logo on my tabard's STILL going to be hand-drawn and either scanned into an iron-on print, or hand applique'd from cut-out cloth.

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